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Tag Archives: NIPS 2012

I had a rather dim view of the NIPS conference venue last year — the Harrah’s and Harveys casino/hotels in South Lake Tahoe. Nothing is more depressing than people playing the slots at 8 AM, smoking and drinking away. Via Erin, I learned that the casinos flooded and are closed : “thousands of gallons of water dumped into Harrah’s, causing the elevators to break.” I can only hope that this is somehow an excuse to not hold NIPS there in the future — but I’m not holding my breath (which I did to avoid the smoke).

Having seen a talk recently by John Ioannidis on how medical research is (often) bunk, this finer corrective by Larry Wasserman was nice to read.

Computer science conferences are often not organized by the ACM, but instead there are different foundations for machine learning and vision and so on that basically exist to organize the annual conference(s). At least, that is what I understand. There are a few which are run by the ACM, and there’s often debate about whether or not the ACM affiliation is worth it, given the overheads and so on. Boaz Barak had a post a little over a week ago making the case for sticking with the ACM. Given the hegemonic control of the IEEE on all things EE (more or less), this debate is new to me. As far as I can tell, ISIT exists to cover some of the cost of publishing the IT Transactions, and so it sort of has to be run by IEEE.

As mentioned before, Tara Javidi has a nice post up on what it means for one random variable to be stochastically less variable than another.

Paul Miniero has a bigger picture view of NIPS — I saw there were lots of papers on “deep learning” but it’s not really my area so I missed many of those posters.